Nathan Summers: Cable Appreciation 2021

[gnostalgic]

Made an account just so I could post to this thread. Sup.

I mean the idea of Krakoa feels like Cable's idea of Providence, so he'll likely jive with it a little at first. Plus I'm still wondering if/how they bring back OMC if he will have only his memories up to Extermination or would he get a blended version (aka both the other version and now his time displaced younger version).

The thing to remember about Providence was that it was open to mutants AND humans. Anyone who wanted to live there could. IMO a major facet of Cable’s character that writers seem to forget about is his concern for the overall well-being of mankind, not just mutantkind. Considering that the society he was raised in was built upon mutants using their superiority to violently oppress humans — and considering that he was raised as a human for most of his childhood— I find it hard to believe he’d drink the Koolaid and wholeheartedly buy into what Krakoa is selling, knowing the kind of world it can lead to. I could see this version of Kid Cable (big emphasis on this VERSION, because we’ve seen stories with Cable as a teen/adolescent and he’s not at all like the one we’re getting now) going along because he’s just happy to have his parents back, but not his adult self. ESPECIALLY with Apocalypse and Sinister being allowed in. Realistically, he should be one of the first people to question what the hell is wrong with everyone and be working in the shadows to get more intel so he could sabotage everything if it turns out shenanigans are afoot. I could also see him just leaving and taking Hope with him, and the two of them going on the run from the Krakoan government; maybe even hooking back up with Deadpool for help. Both would be really cool directions to take him in once he returns.

Also, keep in mind that when he did Providence, everyone — especially the X-Men — thought he went crazy and was amassing way too much power to the point where they threw everything they had at him to stop him, even the Silver freaking Surfer. Even Xavier and his own dad didn’t believe in him. I can’t see him not being just a tiny bit bitter about that lmao.

But that’s assuming anyone working on this line even remembers or cares about anything that happened in Cable & Deadpool which, given everything I’ve been reading, I really doubt.

[Jackraow21]

Great first post. Agree with all of your points.

[gnostalgic]

Thanks! I've been lurking around for about a month just reading what you guys put out. I have a loooot to say about Hickman's X-Men, but I only really got into X-Men to begin with because of Cable, so that's where my main interest with all this Krakoa stuff is.

I do think it's really telling that you look at a forum like this and see a lot of anti-Kid Cable discourse and people willing to call his series out for being pointless and uninteresting, but then you swing over to /r/xmen on reddit and see the opposite. I've seen more people who love Kid Cable because they hated the old one, which I find very telling, and hate that the book is coming to an end because they finally have a reason to care about the character now. What I find really weird is that the one piece of criticism that always comes up is that they love his family dynamic with the other Summerses and hate this all that development is getting "thrown away."

I'm not sure we're reading the same comic because, imo, Kid Cable hasn't developed one bit since 2018; he's still the same bratty, arrogant kid he was from the start. If anything, I think he's gotten a little worse because he has a family that enables his crap now and he's become a bit of a crybaby. It sucks, because while I hate how he was introduced, I still think a lot could have been done with him. You could have taken his superiority over the Old Cable shtick and had him grow from it. Instead of forgiving him, you could have had X-Force continue to carry a grudge against him for killing Old Cable, or had him butt heads with Hope constantly, or done literally anything to acknowledge that what he did to Old Cable may not have went over well with his friends and family, even if Kid Cable's intentions were good. Maybe he comes to terms with that, realizes that he and his future self aren't as different as he thinks, and actively tries to grow into that man. Maybe he joins X-Force and has his former students end up mentoring him. Maybe he rekindles his friendship with Deadpool. Or maybe all of that is thrown out the window, Marvel retcons him into a Cable from an alternate timeline, and he becomes a villain or they do something completely different with him since he's no longer chained to Old Cable's future. There was a ton of potential for something meaningful and creative and I just don't see how people can be happy with a kid who frankly feels like a bad stereotype of a teenager instead of what we could have gotten.

The other thing that confuses me is where this narrative that Cable was never close to his family came from. He interacted with them all the time in the 90s as their son, not just as that hardassed mercenary guy who kept yanking kids from the school to turn into black ops agents. He went from hating Scott for giving him up to punching someone out for daring to talk crap about him. He went to the end of time itself to save Rachel. He joined the X-Men for a bit just so he could fight alongside Jean, and he was the only person she took with him when she went off to save Scott from Apocalypse. ffs, he telepathically reached out to Scott before AvX and entrusted him with his daughter's safety, and there's even a story where he nurses Big Nate back to health after he gets injured and they protect each other from a dangerous monster. He clearly loves the Summers-Grey family, even the weird nebulous ones like Nate. I'd even argue that he cares about Maddie to some extent.

A guy from the future who was raised by loving parents, lost them at a young age and had to grow up in a hostile dystopian world without them, grew into a grimdark edgelord with a different way of doing things from his parents, reunited with them when he went back in time decades later (from his perspective), and loves them every bit as much as he did when he was a kid even though they clash sometimes and he's old enough now to be their father is such a cool concept. You can write so many creative stories and interactions with that. But at some point writers stopped caring or just gave up, and now you forget that Cable is even a Summers unless some big crisis forces him to interact with them. That's not the character's fault and it doesn't mean he isn't interesting or deep. That's on the writers for being uncreative hacks who stopped using him in stories and thought the answer to "fixing" him was to pull a Poochie and make him ~young and cool~ instead of working with what they already had.

tl;dr: X-Men fans weird me out, and I hate it when people talk about Cable like he's not interesting or somehow less valid than characters like Logan, Storm, etc. because it's clear to me that they only know him as "that ugly Liefeld edgelord from the 90s with the big guns" and never bothered to look past that.

[Jackraow21]

tl;dr: X-Men fans weird me out, and I hate it when people talk about Cable like he's not interesting or somehow less valid than characters like Logan, Storm, etc. because it's clear to me that they only know him as "that ugly Liefeld edgelord from the 90s with the big guns" and never bothered to look past that.

Wow. Could not agree more. Over the past 30 years Cable has become hands down one of the most interesting X-men, from the Casey/Ladronn run which really fleshed him out and added a lot of interesting aspects to his character to the Soldier X and Cable/Deadpool runs which made him more of a global power player in the Marvel U (including starting Providence, which was essentially a mutant and human Utopia that predates Krakoa by years) to Mike Carey’s X-men ‘Supernovas’ run and Duggan’s UA run (both with him and Rogue on the same team) which used the character excellently... and I’m not even including the whole Messiah Trilogy (Messiah Complex, Messiah War and Second Coming) which he was very much at the center of. Anyone who still views him as a one-dimensional “ugly Liefeld edge lord from the 90s with big guns (and pouches)” as you put it just doesn’t know squat about Nathan Christopher Dayspring Summers the Askani’son.

Here’s another example of how badass OG Cable is...

https://www.cbr.com/x-men-cable-nimr...organic-virus/

[jwatson]

I was basically SPOT ON with my prediction of cable vs. old cable.

[Alex.]

I was basically SPOT ON with my prediction of cable vs. old cable.

It's an interesting take, honestly.

[Jackraow21]

I was basically SPOT ON with my prediction of cable vs. old cable.

What was your prediction? Just read the issue, so I’m caught up. Enjoyed the twist at the end. It would seem that spoilers:

the old man Cable we’ve seen thus far is Kid Cable grown up in some future hellscape caused by Stryfe, possibly with his mother the Goblin Queen

end of spoilers.

I’m guessing, and this is my theory so no need for spoiler tags (at least I don’t think), that the Inferno like hellscape we’re seeing older Cable in is one that’s caused because he doesn’t go back to the future. But I could be wrong on that.

[jwatson]

What was your prediction? Just read the issue, so I’m caught up. Enjoyed the twist at the end. It would seem that spoilers:

the old man Cable we’ve seen thus far is Kid Cable grown up in some future hellscape caused by Stryfe, possibly with his mother the Goblin Queen

end of spoilers.

I’m guessing, and this is my theory so no need for spoiler tags (at least I don’t think), that the Inferno like hellscape we’re seeing older Cable in is one that’s caused because he doesn’t go back to the future. But I could be wrong on that.

Basically exactly what happened in this issue for the exact same reason. It was posted in that thread where people were talking about young cable going away. Except i had older Cable saying what Scott said. lol

[Jackraow21]

So is your prediction that he doesn’t actually go back to the future, and instead just stays here and gets aged up somehow? If that happens, I suppose it wipes out his dystopian future timeline (as Scott says this issue) but wouldn’t it also undo all the things that the older Cable did in this timeline back in the past? Just like the Teen O5 staying here would have, and why they had to go back.

It would seem to create a paradox if he doesn’t go back to his dystopian future and then come back here at an earlier date to do all the things he did in the past that contributed to the present day. Kind of makes my head hurt honestly, so I’m really ready for this storyline to wrap up one way or the other. Either the OG version of Cable (full grown, heavily muscled, silver haired) is restored or he remains a kid. If the former, I cheer. If the latter, the character stays dead to me. But either way I’m looking for some closure as this particular plot line has dragged on forever.

[jwatson]

So is your prediction that he doesn’t actually go back to the future, and instead just stays here and gets aged up somehow? If that happens, I suppose it wipes out his dystopian future timeline (as Scott says this issue) but wouldn’t it also undo all the things that the older Cable did in this timeline back in the past? Just like the Teen O5 staying here would have, and why they had to go back.

It would seem to create a paradox if he doesn’t go back to his dystopian future and then come back here at an earlier date to do all the things he did in the past that contributed to the present day. Kind of makes my head hurt honestly, so I’m really ready for this storyline to wrap up one way or the other. Either the OG version of Cable (full grown, heavily muscled, silver haired) is restored or he remains a kid. If the former, I cheer. If the latter, the character stays dead to me. But either way I’m looking for some closure as this particular plot line has dragged on forever.

No he doesn't get aged up at all. My theory is he lives his life. Remember krakoans don't have eternal youth.

[Jackraow21]

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but if he just stays and lives his life here then he never returns to his future to finish growing up there; and thus never comes back as an adult, and then so many things did not happen... the OG X-Force was never formed, he didn’t stop Apocalypse’s harbinger or help defeat Onslaught in the 90s, he wasn’t there for the events of The Twelve saga, or anything that happened in Cable & Deadpool series in the 00s, or any of the stuff with Hope and the Messiah Trilogy that literally brought mutants back from the verge of extinction... and so on and so forth. It wipes out a ton of important $#!t he did that contributed to the present day.

[jwatson]

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but if he just stays and lives his life here then he never returns to his future to finish growing up there; and thus never comes back as an adult, and then so many things did not happen... the OG X-Force was never formed, he didn’t stop Apocalypse’s harbinger or help defeat Onslaught in the 90s, he wasn’t there for the events of The Twelve saga, or anything that happened in Cable & Deadpool series in the 00s, or any of the stuff with Hope and the Messiah Trilogy that literally brought mutants back from the verge of extinction... and so on and so forth. It wipes out a ton of important $#!t he did that contributed to the present day.

Not for me to figure out. Maybe some people will just forget some of those memories over time. I mean technically though if the others remember it it still happened in some way because the thoughts are there.

[Jackraow21]

Ha. Fair enough. But IMO that would be lazy writing on Duggan’s part, to introduce a time paradox here when it was already established that such a paradox could not exist with regards to the O5, and thus they had to go back to do all the things they did before.

It seems he’s at least cognizant of that problem, however, since Kid Cable makes that exact point this issue. For whatever reason (perhaps blinded by love of having his son back) Cyclops buries his head in the sand on it and acts like it’s not an issue. But Extermination established that it very much is an issue.

[Kingdom X]

If the original Cable comes back, I would be so mad if I was him. This issue demonstrated that the ONLY person who seems to care that he’s gone is Hope.

[Jackraow21]

If the original Cable comes back, I would be so mad if I was him. This issue demonstrated that the ONLY person who seems to care that he’s gone is Hope.

Agreed. Scott acts like he didn’t even know the older version of his son. It’s bizarre honestly.

Having said that, I fully expect that the older version is coming back... or an older version. Characters, especially ones that are popular and have appeared in other media, almost always revert to their status quo look. So when that happens, I do hope that the big silver haired guy keeps the Light of Galador. Because it’s kind of rad seeing him use it honestly, as this issue demonstrates.